Abstract
While there is increasing evidence that marine bacteria are involved in the production of paralytic shellfish toxins in algal blooms, the exact roles of the bacteria and microalgae have proved elusive. A novel experimental approach to this problem involved incubating parallel cultures of toxin producing Alexandrium minutum Anokoha A in the dark and in a natural daylight cycle. High-performance liquid chromatography was used to measure paralytic shellfish toxins while bacterial growth was monitored by culture on high- and low-nutrient agar media. After a 22-day incubation period in the dark, A. minutum Anokoha A failed to produce saxitoxin while parallel light-grown cultures produced 1.17 μg per 10,000 algal cells. However, both dark- and light-grown cultures showed comparable gonyautoxin production. Copiotrophic and oligotrophic algal-associated bacteria showed similar growth patterns over the incubation period except that a dip in bacterial numbers corresponded to a peak in algal numbers in the light-grown cultures. It appears that inhibition of photosynthesis resulted in changes in the toxin profile of A. minutum Anokoha A. When used with other methods, this approach may help to elucidate the algal–bacterial-toxin connection.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Lincoln MacKenzie, Cawthron Institute, Nelson, New Zealand for the continued use of his A. minutum Anakoha A isolate. E.W.M was funded by a HRC postgraduate scholarship. We thank the Cawthron Institute, Nelson, New Zealand for the use of their HPLC and toxin standards and A. Wade for assistance with graphs.
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Maas, E.W., Brooks, H.J.L. Is photosynthesis a requirement for paralytic shellfish toxin production in the dinoflagellate Alexandrium minutum algal–bacterial consortium?. J Appl Phycol 22, 293–296 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-009-9458-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-009-9458-1